Note: The following is a transcription from a now-lost radio interview. It is notable for delving further into the Bond books than the usual interviews with Fleming. My thanks to the fellow researcher and collector who found and kindly sent me the transcript.
New Comment (The BBC Third Programme, April 18, 1962)
This evening’s programme is devoted to some aspects of the thriller…In the novel there have been perhaps more kinds of thriller, not surprisingly, than in any other art form: the ghost story, the Gothic horror novel, the science fiction novel, the detective story are all variants on the thriller formula. But in England, perhaps the most successful and original variant, at any rate over the last fifty years, has been the spy story.
It’s perhaps a consequence of our position as an imperial power in decline that our writers of thrillers since Buchan and Sapper have been preoccupied with the mystique of the English gentleman as a sort of individual lever of the political world, averting disaster with a flick of his eyelashes between two glasses of Marsala in his Brook Street club. The James Bond novels of Ian Fleming stand squarely in this tradition of the elegant spy story with an upper middle class flavour, but they’ve added the new and crucial ingredient of detailed popular newspaper realism—in setting, in background information, in their descriptions of sex and violence. In the following recorded interview Ian Fleming talks to T. G. Rosenthal about the nature of the thriller, and about his own work in this field.
Aficionados of Mr. Fleming’s thrillers will perhaps like to known that the interview took place at the top of a certain discretely distinguished building near Regents Park, which may account for the quality of the recording; alternatively you could put it down to a frustrated attempt at jamming on the part of Smersh.
T.G. ROSENTHAL: Mr. Fleming, it seems to me that a great deal of the appeal of the James Bond stories you’ve written is a kind of escapism—it’s the kind of escapism which you also find in the cinema, but if one just goes back to your short story that you wrote for the Sunday Times a few weeks ago, there’s a moment when the man who is instructing Bond at the rifle range at Bisley sees Bond finish, pack up, go away, and he says to himself “Mm. ’Spose he’s off to London to get a woman or something. Yes, he’s the kind who can get any number of women he likes.”
Now this seems to me to be almost an archetypal comment about Bond, and I’m sure it’s one of those things that makes him most successful, because for the average Englishman to read about such a character and then identify with him, this undoubtedly gives him a thrill, and do you agree with this?
FLEMING: Well I s’ppose I do. I think all life or history is violence and sex, and I think that undoubtedly large proportions of them appear in my books. I think that it would be very hard if they didn’t because the thriller is a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress where you get the man starting off in rather poor shape and gradually working his way up until he defeats the villain and wins the prize, so to speak; and it’s perfectly true that in the case of most thrillers and certainly in the case of mine, the prize is a beautiful girl very often.
ROSENTHAL: As much as the actual goal of whatever his Secret Service was? Are the two equal in your structure?
FLEMING: Very much subsidiary—the girl or girls come into the story as part of the exercise in which Bond is engaged. Possibly [in] my present book that’s come out the girl takes the major part, because it is in fact the girl who is telling the story.
ROSENTHAL: Well you’ve mentioned the form of the thriller—now it’s a cliché to say that one of the chief problems of any kind of writing is self-discipline, but don’t you think that in the form which you have set yourself—with the exception of the latest book which we’ll come to later—but in the previous nine, you seem to have set yourself a certain formula, which I think ought to at least ease the problem of self-discipline, because having worked out this formula you can then fit the book to it. Do you find that this is in fact a help and does it give you a certain greater fluency?
FLEMING: Well of course I don’t see the formula. You perhaps see that as a reader and critic, but to my mind they’re all just entirely separate stories. Perhaps you could call them fairy stories for grown-ups, which I have to think I wrote entirely separately. I can’t fall back on what you would call a formula, because when I sit down at my desk with page one in front of me in the typewriter, yawning at me, I’ve got to tell a story of one kind or another. To fit it to formula doesn’t really cross my mind.
ROSENTHAL: No, wasn’t in any sense accusing you of having all the books the same—they’re all extremely different of course and there’s no question of any similarity between two books—
FLEMING: —I think I see what you mean.
ROSENTHAL: —but you can always be sure of one good bedroom scene, in nearly all the books there’s a torture scene of some kind, there’ll always be a shooting, there’ll always be a briefing by M and so on.
FLEMING: Yes I think there’s a lot in that, but of course he’s a serial character, James Bond, and he’s got to be started off on his mission by somebody, and the Secret Service has got to send him off and very often [there’s] a useful way of getting the plot on the move by M, who’s his Secret Service chief, saying “Look here, we’ve got a very nasty problem on our hands in Paraguay.” Well, now already you’ve got two or three chapters…letting the reader into the secret of more or less what Bond’s task is in this particular book, and if one didn’t have that, which is of course partly a formula, it’d be much more difficult.
In From Russia With Love for instance I started at the other end with a similar, so to speak, situation in the Russian secret service headquarters, where there was a briefing going on for the destruction of Bond, and Bond only then himself came in halfway through as being the object of the destruction of him that had been planned in Moscow.
ROSENTHAL: Yes, and indeed in fact From Russia With Love is the only book which ends with—obviously not disaster, because Bond is alive again for Doctor No, which is I think the one that followed, isn’t it?
FLEMING: Yes.
ROSENTHAL: [Bond is] getting an enormous rocket at the beginning of Doctor No for his slip-up at the end of From Russia With Love, but of course the last page of From Russia With Love shows Bond probably dying after being poisoned by the fiendish Russian woman.
FLEMING: Well that is quite correct, fictionally correct, because Bond had made an awful fool of himself in his behaviour at the end of that book, and he deserved punishment, which he in fact received.
ROSENTHAL: Using this word “punishment”—do you regard yourself as a moralist in any way?
FLEMING: (LAUGHING) I don’t know about that—I don’t think so, and I’d never pretend that James Bond is a particularly desirable character. I don’t really pretend that he’s a hero at all. I make it pretty clear that he’s got unlikeable traits, but does a very good job, and when I first thought of him as a character I intended him to be purely a blunt instrument in the hands of his government, who would be subjected to various adventures and excitements, but who would not show up as the stock hero of, for instance, let’s say the Buchan books or Bulldog Drummond, and so on and so forth, or the Saint, where the man is definitely given a heroic role. I meant this man really to be an extremely capable instrument in the hands of the government, and that is one of the reasons why I gave him such an extremely dull name, because rather than call him, for instance, Peregrine Carruthers, or something of that sort, I called him James Bond, being to my mind the dullest name I could lay my hands on.
ROSENTHAL: Yet you do Mr. Fleming, don’t you give Bond a certain number of rather better characteristics? You do give him [those] in one or two of the books, for example in Casino Royale [Bond] moralises himself, he philosophizes—he asks himself is it a good job he’s doing, should he be doing it, then he justifies the various killings he’s done, certainly the so-called cold-blooded ones, and finds reasons why they had to be done and were in fact unavoidable for the interests of the State, and leaving aside mere self-preservation.
FLEMING: Yes, you’re perfectly correct about that—probably I have a certain amount of sympathy for the chap, or [have been] developing one over the years, and I feel that he ought not to be made out quite such a monster as some of his critics do make him out as, and no doubt I write in these passages quite subconsciously, trying to make out that Bond is in fact a nicer man than he really is.
ROSENTHAL: …Well, of course you have a number of adverse critics who dislike the so-called cult of violence, but then there was, wasn’t there, this leader in the Guardian which said, among other things, that the books are providing a conveniently accessible safety valve for the boiling sensibility of modern man, and also provide a vicarious satisfaction of innately violent instincts.
FLEMING: Yes, I think it was rather well-said. As a matter of fact Paul Gallico said something rather similar—he wrote a most entertaining introduction to an omnibus volume of mine which appeared in America, and he likened the whole business to the psychologist’s theory that if you keep a cat you are in fact keeping a small tiger. I mean that in your mind the sense of danger of keeping a tiger is reproduced in the keeping of a cat.
ROSENTHAL: Mmm—mmm. If we could look for a moment at the sadistic element in the books, which I think is undeniable, how much of this is done in an attempt to titillate an audience, or how much is it done in the knowledge that this is rather what your readers want or expect?
FLEMING: Well, when I started out to write these books, it was really quite soon after the war, and I’d worked in Naval Intelligence and [was] fairly close to the sort of things that go on in a tenser form in the James Bond books, and the violence, or sadism that you mention, that appears in the books, is as nothing to what occurs in real life, in the life of true James Bonds.
ROSENTHAL: Well, it’s going on at the moment in Algeria and has been for a long time of course.
FLEMING: Yes, well that is true, and the tortures that I know of that were inflicted on our secret agents, particularly by the Moroccan French—if I published anything approaching their violence and horribleness, then I should undoubtedly be overstepping the bounds of what can be written. But I think this sort of Bulldog Drummond business of the hero just getting a bang on the head with a sort of wooden mallet isn’t good enough nowadays. We’ve been through a couple of major wars, and we know perfectly well that human beings do wreak far worse vengeance on each other than has ever been written in the old-fashioned thrillers, say, and as I try to make my thrillers…get fairly close to the truth of life, perhaps this kind of truth is unpalatable to some people, and also perhaps totally beyond our experience or knowledge.
ROSENTHAL: I think you’d agree with me that there is a very definite James Bond cult—some of the blurbs of your jackets refer to James Bond clubs and so on. Do you at all relish the idea, and I’m sure it’s going to come sooner or later, if it hasn’t already, of earnest Ph.D students in minor American universities taking all your books apart and analysing them and producing statistics of how many times Bond in the first part of lovemaking reaches for the right breast and feels the erect nipple and so on—
FLEMING: Well—I’m horrified at the thought it might happen, but it is already doing so. In fact I got a letter from an extremely earnest lady student in Germany the other day, asking for some information, because she was in fact writing her Doctorate thesis on the subject of the James Bond books, and that was in Germany, where I’m not very widely published.
ROSENTHAL: It seems to me that you have made a very definite and a very successful effort at a closely reasoned and fairly serious medium [in] your thrillers, following in the tradition of people in America like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Have you felt yourself to be influenced by these people—particularly, I think, Chandler?
FLEMING: Yes, definitely. I was tremendously impressed by both those writers—the fact that they got away from Mandarin English and also told a more of less truthful type of story. I admit fantasy enters into mine far more than it does into theirs, but it did seem to me that they’d taken the thriller a tremendous step forward away from ham, so to speak, and of course one of my great ambitions would be to write—as indeed Raymond Chandler says himself in his book Chandler Speaking—to write a great novel that would also be a great thriller. And I’m sure it’s certainly quite possible because when you look at the Russians—look at Tolstoy, Doestoevsky, the tremendously thrilling elements in their great novels.
I’m not in the least ashamed of telling a story, so to speak, I’m very unfashionable in that way, and I’m sure that we shall come upon a writer—Simenon is after all very nearly that, he’s written some quite remarkable novels, in which elements of violence and terror and death are very strong. Certainly as people become more adult in their reading habits, I think the thriller will develop along those lines—let’s say it [will] get closer to the novel, while at the same time remaining the telling of a story, rather than let us say, [the] lopped end of a life, which is rather current today.
ROSENTHAL: Well if we hark for a moment on the question of the novel, which is more important to you—the sequence of events, or individual events? You have written a few short stories, haven’t you, which seem to me to be constructed in a very similar fashion to the novels, in that there is always a beautiful girl involved, there is once more the element of pursuit and of capture, and of extreme violence and brutality. In other words, it seems to me that you can compress certain aspects of your novels into a much shorter space, but is it the whole sequence that counts or is it the individual events?
FLEMING: Well, I think that pace is probably the answer to that question—it’s a rather difficult question to answer. What I have tried to achieve is speed. That’s why you find very little dialogue on the whole in my books, and a great deal of incidents and descriptions of places and things. Whereas of course in a novel, it’s very difficult to write a successful novel unless you have long passages of dialogue, which personally bore me because I’m not very good at writing dialogue. I can pick up a Raymond Chandler and read his dialogue just for the pleasure of reading his dialogue, and very often, as I think must possibly occur in the case of many readers, one doesn’t really honestly know what the devil’s going on in a Chandler book, but the dialogue is so good it carries one…
…As many readers will find, they can pick up, as I can, a Raymond Chandler book and read it [as] such for the sake of the brilliance of the dialogue, and I, for my part, very often haven’t got the foggiest notion what is really happening in a Chandler book—I just read it with great pleasure because it’s so highly intelligent, but I think his plots are extremely dubious, very often he loses track of…
ROSENTHAL: You said a few minutes ago Mr. Fleming that you were very interested in the form of the novel as such, and that you would one day like to write a great novel which was also a great thriller. Now in your latest book, The Spy Who Loved Me, it seems to me that you’ve gone much more over to the novel rather than the thriller; certainly in the first half dealing with the spy, it’s obviously different because you’ve written it from the point of view of a girl. But also Bond comes into it very late indeed—is this a deliberate attempt to break away from what you feel might be a limiting formula or what?
FLEMING: Well I think if you’re writing about a serial character, and trying to be slightly intelligent about doing so, you do get rather tired of the reader’s desire that you should produce exactly the same mixture as before, and in this last book of mine, The Spy Who Loved Me, I have tried to get away from that, for a change—an intellectual change for myself, perhaps, and I’ve tried to look at Bond as one might say from the other end of the gun barrel, and the book purports to be written by a girl, and it is how she sees Bond, but I have tried to put [that] across, rather than for instance how Bond sees the girl, which is fact is not mentioned at all.
ROSENTHAL: But there are in fact only a very few pages which actually put this across—between a third and a half of the book is devoted to the girl’s previous history and her maltreatment at the hands of rather contemptible men.
FLEMING: Well, I had to make the girl the sort of girl to whom the exciting events that then come to pass would come to pass. She’s a French-Canadian, she’s had rather [a] normal life perhaps, but in London, before she gets to this rather sinister hotel in America, and I think artistically—if one can put it like that, or from the point of view of craftsmanship—I had to explain the girl pretty thoroughly before the gangsters arrived on the scene and then subsequently James Bond.
ROSENTHAL: Mmm. If we can change the subject completely, although in fact it’s a reversion to Hammett and Chandler, we’ve seen many films of books from those two, we know what their private eyes look like. It seems to me quite extraordinary—particularly these days, when a writer has to depend very often on film rights in order to live properly—that we haven’t yet had any James Bond films. Are there any on the way?
FLEMING: They just have begun. Previously there’s been a lot of dickering and flirting with the idea of Hollywood, which generally consisted of having very expensive lunches, and everybody saying “Ian, what a wonderful writer you are and what wonderful films you’d make, Ian” and so on and so forth, and then nothing—everything…fades out and Mr. Finkelstein disappears back into Hollywood, and that’s the end of that. But now [the] extremely able team of producers who made Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Entertainer and many other films have now got rights nearly all the James Bond books—all the James Bond books that are free, and they have started in effect.
They’re very nearly finished doing the first one, which is Doctor No—which is an extremely expensive affair in Technicolour—and I went and watched one or two scenes being shot on location in Jamaica, and I’ve seen some rushes from it and it does seem to me to get back to the likes of The Guns of Navarone—the old sort of blood and thunder film which I personally have always greatly enjoyed—when you stagger out into the night at the end of the film not really knowing what’s hit you. As for instance, Hitchcock, in his excellent North by Northwest pulled one’s legs so much that one went out into the night not knowing whether to laugh or be frightened.
ROSENTHAL: Who is playing Bond and do you approve of him?
FLEMING: I urged them not to get a typed actor, but to try and find somebody who was comparatively unknown, and they’ve found a most admirable man called Sean Connery, who is a Scotsman, and he’s a well-known Shakespearian actor, and he’s done a bit of TV as well. He’s boxed for the Navy, he weight-lifts for Scotland, and he plays centre-forward for the Variety Association Football team at weekends. He’s very good-looking, moves very well, very good with a gun, and I think he’ll do the job absolutely splendidly.
They’ve got a very beautiful Swiss actress called Ursula Andress who appears as the heroine in this, and some extremely good subsidiary characters…a very good villain called Wiseman from America, and a very good coloured man in the part of Quarrel, which is a rather important subsidiary part in the picture. And from what I can see they’re doing a tremendous job of it, and I suppose it’ll be coming out round the end of about August or September, and of course I shall be extremely interested to see what the public think of it all.
ROSENTHAL: Have you in fact any part in the supervision of the technical problems of that sort of grim obstacle race which Bond has towards the end of the book?
FLEMING: I’ve given them some ideas, but as a matter of fact I’ve kept as far away as possible because if you get mixed up in show business it can be an extremely time-wasting affair, and I have been writing in the last two months, while they’ve been filming, another full-length James Bond story, so I didn’t want to get too tied-up in the show business side of things.
ROSENTHAL: Is this all Bond this time?
FLEMING: Yes. First page to last.
ROSENTHAL: Er—good.